The politics of organized networks : the art of collective coordination and the seriality of demands

Internet activism has grown up and is huge, comparable to gender struggles and climate change disputes. This is the age of WikiLeaks, Anonymous, denial-of-service attacks on vital infrastructure and National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, all capturing the global imagination‒in a world which, already for decades, has remained terra incognita for the (media) establishment. The right to communicate is vital and no longer a luxury. Yet the revolutionary spread of connectivity and storage does not translate into an equivalent victory for the freedom of communication. Quite the contrary. After a good decade of struggles since 9/11, cyber-rights activists are in danger of falling into a lethargic state of depression. A picture emerges of a globe with increasing connectivity and a growing diversity of crises, with short-lived protest movements that accompany a loss of legitimacy of the political classes. The question this essay poses is whether small and dense communities (what we call here ‘orgnets’) can be a possible answer to the crisis of the family, church, trade unions and political parties as traditional social formations. If sit-ins, affinity groups, alternative scenes and autonomous cells are phenomena of the past, can ‘organized networks’ become the preferred forms of sustained political mobilization for the decade to come